Sunday, 7 September 2014

Artists: week 7 one

Philip-Lorca Dicorcia

The context here is the economic crash of 2007-2008, and while single images worked for me - a lone woman in a hotel room with sky scrapers in the distance across the water - the whole does not transcend the sum of the parts. Here and there, the symbolism was somehow both overloaded and not entirely clear: a dart suspended in mid-air as it flies towards a boy's face seemed too small and nasty a gesture, however beautiful the composition, to summon the idea of biblical sacrfice.

I was slightly bemused, too, by Dicorcia revelation that Lucy 13, his series of naked pole dancers in suspended motion, was prompted by the famous news photograph The Falling Man, which caught a ting figure dropping from the north tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. I liked the images a lot more before I learned that - but the workings of the minds of certain conceptualists remain, by their very obliqueness, a mystery to the rest us.